Paper bush, Edgeworthia chrysantha, spends the growing season as a quiet, blue-green shrub and saves the show for the dead of winter. In late winter and earliest spring, while the branches are still bare, the shrub hangs rounded, downward-facing clusters of small tubular flowers from the tips of every stem, silvery-furred buds opening to warm yellow throats that carry a sweet, daphne-like fragrance across cold air. A cousin of Daphne and the native leatherwood Dirca in the family Thymelaeaceae, paper bush shares the tribe's supple, hard-to-snap branches and honeyed scent.
Yaupon is the small-leaved evergreen holly of the Southeast, native along the coastal plain from Virginia to Texas and a member of the holly family, Aquifoliaceae. Salt tolerant, drought tolerant, and willing in sun or shade, the species shears as cleanly as boxwood and has long been a Southern mainstay for hedges and clipped structure, the females carrying translucent scarlet berries into winter. 'Yawkey' rewrites that last detail in a rarer color: this is a yellow-berried yaupon, hung each winter with soft amber-gold fruit instead of red, on an upright, somewhat open and spreading frame.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
8–12 ft.
Spread
6–10 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
general wellness, mental & emotional well-being, detoxification & cleansing
Ilex paraguariensis is the holly behind maté, the caffeine-rich tea poured from a gourd and sipped through a metal straw across Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and southern Brazil. As a plant, yerba maté is a broadleaf evergreen holly, a shrub or small tree with dark, leathery, serrated leaves, closely resembling the native dahoon holly, Ilex cassine, of the southeastern United States, and carrying the same small white flowers and, on female plants, small red berries.
Rohdea japonica, the sacred lily or Nippon lily, is a bold, slow, tufted evergreen perennial grown above all for foliage, and this selection carries the darkest leaves of all, an almost black, glossy green that anchors a shaded planting through the whole year and lights up a winter landscape when little else holds. Rather sizeable red berries ripen in tight clusters, half-hidden at the base of the leaves, a quiet second season for anyone who looks closely.
Persea borbonia, the redbay, is a handsome broadleaf evergreen native to the southeastern United States, ranging from coastal Virginia through Florida and west along the Gulf. A member of the laurel family and a close relative of the avocado, the redbay carries the same aromatic oils, and the glossy leaves have long been used in the southern kitchen much as bay laurel (Laurus nobilis) is, to season soups, stews, and gumbo.
Japanese cedar is a tall, pyramidal to conical evergreen conifer, and the great timber tree of Japan, where the sugi soars past a hundred feet and lines temple avenues and mountain forests alike. The blue-green needles are held close and awl-shaped, taking on a bronzy, purple-bronze cast through cold winters before recovering their color in spring. The reddish-brown bark peels in long fibrous strips down a straight, buttressed trunk.
Hamamelis virginiana does everything backwards, and that is the entire appeal. When the rest of the woods has shut down for the year, when the leaves are gone and nothing else is in flower, witch hazel chooses that exact moment to bloom: spidery yellow flowers, all thin crimped strap-like petals, scattered along the bare branches through late fall and into the cold. They carry a faint sweet scent on a mild day and they wait, patiently, for whatever gnat or late fly is still working, because almost nothing else is. This is the shrub that flowers when flowering makes no sense, and is all the more loved for the defiance.
For a plant this common, the Christmas fern carries an oddly specific origin for the name. The fern was christened, the story goes, by one John Robinson, a botany professor at the Peabody Academy in Salem, Massachusetts, sometime in the late 1800s, and set down for posterity in a 1923 volume with the irreproachable title The Fern-Lover's Companion. Robinson's reasoning was seasonal. When the other ferns of the eastern woods go brown and crisp at the first hard frost, Polystichum acrostichoides holds green straight through December, which made the plant the fern people cut for wreaths and mantels at Christmas. There is a second theory, quieter and harder to settle, that the name comes from the leaflets themselves: look closely and each pinna carries a small lobe at its base, an ear or a thumb, that gives the leaflet the outline of a Christmas stocking. Both camps are probably right.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Part Shade / Full Shade
Height
1–2 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Plant type
Fern
Traditional use
pain relief, respiratory support, digestive health
Jasminum nudiflorum, the winter jasmine, is the great cold-weather bloomer of the genus, a deciduous scrambling shrub from western China that opens bright yellow, six-petaled flowers on bare green stems in the depth of winter, often from January into March, long before the leaves return. The name says as much: nudiflorum, the naked-flowering jasmine, blooming on stripped, leafless wands.
Hardiness
Zones 6–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
3–4 ft.
Spread
4–7 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
topical applications, general wellness, immune support, digestive health
Ruscus aculeatus, Butcher's Broom, is a low evergreen shrub of the asparagus family, native to the woodlands of southern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East, and reaching north into the milder parts of the British Isles. What look like glossy, spine-tipped leaves are not leaves at all but flattened stems called cladodes, which take over the work of photosynthesis while the true leaves are reduced to tiny scales. The generic name comes from the Latin ruscum, the old word for a butcher's broom, and the epithet aculeatus means prickled, for the sharp point that tips each cladode.
There are plants that offer fragrance, and then there are plants that conjure memory. Lavandula dentata, with silvery, sawtoothed leaves and near ever-blooming lavender plumes, belongs firmly to the second kind, a bearer of the sort of scent that lingers in a sun-warmed linen chest or in the folds of a well-worn book left on a porch rail.
Hardiness
Zones 8–11
Light
Full Sun
Height
2–3 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
mental & emotional well-being, topical applications, respiratory support, digestive health
Rosemary is a timeless classic in both the garden and the kitchen, an aromatic evergreen shrub of the sun-baked Mediterranean coast, so distinctive that botanists long kept rosemary in a genus apart, Rosmarinus officinalis, before recent study moved the herb into the sages as Salvia rosmarinus. The old genus name means dew of the sea, for the plant's love of bright, salt-swept coastal hillsides. Slender, needle-like, deep green leaves clothe the woody stems the year round, and soft blue flowers open along them from winter into spring.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun
Height
2–4 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
Blue
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, mental & emotional well-being, general wellness, topical applications
